Against Anthropocentrism: the Destruction of the Built Environment As a Distinct Form of Political Violence

Against anthropocentrism: the destruction of the built environment as a distinct form of political violence Article (Published Version) Coward, Martin (2006) Against anthropocentrism: the destruction of the built environment as a distinct form of political violence. Review of International Studies, 32 (3). pp. 419-437. ISSN 0260- 2105 This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/12728/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse: Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University. Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. 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Against anthropocentrism: the destruction of the built environment as a distinct form of political violence. Review of International Studies, 32, pp 419-437 doi:10.1017/S0260210506007091 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/RIS, IP address: 84.92.41.220 on 26 Jun 2014 Review of International Studies (2006), 32, 419–437 Copyright British International Studies Association doi:10.1017/S0260210506007091 Against anthropocentrism: the destruction of the built environment as a distinct form of political violence MARTIN COWARD Abstract. This article examines the nature of the destruction of built environments. Such destruction should be seen as a distinct form of violence: urbicide. This violence comprises the destruction of shared spatiality which is the condition of possibility of heterogeneous communities. Urbicide, insofar as it is a destruction of heterogeneity in general, is thus a manifestation of a ‘politics of exclusion’. However, this account of the destruction of the built environment is not only an insight into a distinct form of political violence. Rather, an account of urbicide also offers a metatheoretical argument regarding the scholarly study of political violence: namely that destruction of built environments contests the anthropocentric frame that usually dominates the study of violence. Introduction: urban destruction and ‘anthropocentric bias’ On 9th November 1993 the Bosnian–Croat army (HVO) destroyed the Stari Most, or Old Bridge, in Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina. The bridge had spanned the Neretva river for over 400 years and was regarded as being both integral to the city of Mostar as well as an outstanding example of both Ottoman and Bosnian cultural heritage. Video footage of this event featured in numerous television news bulletins, adding to the stream of horrifying representations of suffering emerging from the bloody disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. The destruction of the Stari Most was striking insofar as it dramatically illustrated the violence perpetrated against Bosnians and their heritage.1 1 Michael Sells’ definition of Bosnians (as opposed to Bosnian–Croat, or Bosnian–Serb) as ‘all residents of the internationally recognized sovereign nation of Bosnia–Herzegovina, regardless of their religious affiliation, who consider themselves Bosnian, that is, who remain loyal to a Bosnian state built on the principles of civic society and religious pluralism’ is the one that I would follow in this argument (Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), pp. xiv). This definition is more adequate in describing those who were the principal victims of such violence than the somewhat mistaken designation of ‘Bosnian Muslim’. Just as the Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust, so those who could be identified as ‘Muslim’ were not the only victims of the Bosnian Serbs. Indeed, in most discourse ‘Muslim’ is deployed as a ‘catch-all’ category for all those who found themselves to be opposed to, victims of, or excluded from, the Bosnian–Serb or Bosnian–Croat nationalist programmes. See also in this regard Tone Bringa’s comments on the evolution of Bošnjac identity (Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 34–36). 419 420 Martin Coward However, although it became a singularly iconic event, the destruction of the Stari Most should not be seen as an isolated case of urban destruction. Indeed, this incident is representative of a widespread assault upon urban fabric that has been a defining feature of post-Cold War conflicts such as the 1992–95 Bosnian war, the Russian invasion of Chechnya, and the intensification of the Israel–Palestine conflict in the wake of the second intifada. These conflicts have witnessed the deliberate destruction not only of symbolic cultural heritage, but also of the more mundane components of the built environment: shops, flats, houses, car parks, cafés, public squares and so on.2 Croatian writer Slaveneka Drakulic’s Mostar Bridge Elegy, written shortly after the demolition of the Stari Most, represents an attempt to understand the significance of such urban destruction.3 Writing about the relation between a photograph of the space left between the two banks of the Neretva by the collapse of the Stari Most and a photograph of a Bosnian Muslim woman with her throat cut (after the massacre at Stupni Dol), Drakulic asks, ‘Why do I feel more pain looking at the image of the destroyed bridge than the image of the woman?’4 She goes on to reply: Perhaps it is because I see my own mortality in the collapse of the bridge, not in the death of the woman. We expect people to die. We count on our own lives to end . The bridge [however] was built to outlive us . it transcended our individual destiny. A dead woman is one of us – but the bridge is all of us.5 At first glance, this assertion appears counter-intuitive: it seems to contradict our most deeply-held values. Our immediate reaction is one of scandal. Drakulic’s assertion requires us to accept that it is possible for the destruction of a building to be more significant than the death of a human being. Her remarks contest that understanding of the world which portrays subjects living out their lives centre-stage against an ephemeral background. Instead, Drakulic is suggesting that it is ‘life’ which is ephemeral and that the ‘world’ must be understood as being constituted by that which was previously thought to be the mere background for activity: buildings. Thus Drakulic is arguing that it is not sufficient to regard the bridge as a part of a material backdrop against which lives are played out, or as equipment instrumental to the pursuance of this ‘life’. If we follow Drakulic’s comments, understanding the phenomenon of urban destruction requires a reversal of the ‘anthropocentric bias’ that accords more value to human life than to the ‘material’ in, around, and through which that life is lived. Anthropocentrism can be defined, broadly, as an implicit or explicit assumption ‘that human reason and sentience places the human being on a higher ground’.6 This assumption is the ground for a conceptual division between human beings and nature, or, more broadly, between human beings and all the other non-human elements that comprise the world and which, whether living or non-living, are seen merely as the context within which human lives are lived. Such a conceptual division 2 Nicholas Adams, ‘Architecture as the Target’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,52 (December 1993), also available at 〈http://www.kakarigi.net/manu/jsah-ed.htm〉. 3 Slavenka Drakulic, ‘Falling Down: A Mostar Bridge Elegy’, The New Republic (13 December 1993), pp, 14–15. 4 Drakulic, ‘Falling Down’, p. 15 (my emphasis). 5 Ibid. (my emphasis). 6 Hakan Seckinelgin, The Environment and International Politics: International Fisheries, Heidegger and Social Method (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 31. Against anthropocentrism 421 has led to an understanding of the world in which the activities of human beings are understood to be of paramount interest and engagements with the remainder of the world are construed solely in terms of the uses to which humans put their material context. In International Relations thinking, the identification and critique of ‘anthropocentric bias’ has been developed primarily within discussions of environmental politics.7 This is hardly surprising insofar as one of the central concerns of environmental politics has been to overcome the division between man and the environment that has resulted in the latter being conceived of as an instrumental resource for the gratification of the former. Overcoming such an anthropocentric conceptual division is necessary in order to see the material world as a complex ecology in which human beings are part of, not distinct from, nature.8 The ‘anthropocentric bias’ is not, however, confined to environmental politics.

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